When my son plays games, he collects coins. He learns lessons about money and commerce as he trades rewards for resources that bring him closer to his objective. He’s slowly internalizing confidence around saving, investing, and financial priorities.

Alternatively, the apps aimed at my daughter, with their pink princess icons, are all about baking cupcakes, shopping, or playing dress up.

No wonder money is an awkward subject for women.

She concludes:

Let’s condition our little princesses to know that they don’t need to be rescued. They can buy their own tiaras.

While Steinberg, who is well known as founder and CEO of DailyWorth.com, is hardly unique in her criticism of the “princess rescue fantasy,” her understanding of the psychological impact of video games is impressive. She recognizes that games function much like fairy tales. While our children are sliding their fingers across the iPad’s surface, distracted so that we can have a quiet moment in which to write another blog post, they are also inheriting ways of thinking, cultural attitudes, and social priorities.

In her book The Interpretation of Fairy Tales, Swiss analyst Marie Louise Von Franz wrote, “Fairy tales are the purest and simplest expression of collective unconscious psychic processes.” She wrote these words in 1970, long before touch screen apps were ubiquitous. But I imagine that if Von Franz were still alive she’d take a keen interest in video games. Or more specifically, she’d analyze the new interactive and non-linear technologies through which we transmit our collective mythology. She’d ask, do new technologies beget new stories? If not, they’re hardly revolutionary; not an innovation, but rather a renovation--a faux facade slapped atop a well worn foundation.

Implicitly, Steinberg’s piece says as much. And it is about much more than just gender. As one of the new internet icons, Amanda’s just the right person to remind us that substance should trump style. Web, mobile tech, and apps are not, in themselves, positive; instead, it all boils down to the ways we leverage these technologies for social good. Thus, Steinberg challenges entrepreneurs and game developers to consider their messaging and redesign content with intention. Put simply, new digital media is unimpressive if the underlying content remains unchanged.

Unfortunately, the majority of our thinking about video games, touch screen media, and educational technology focuses almost entirely on the medium. Countless studies ask how tech is related to biological, cognitive, and neurological development. Questions like: How does multi-tasking impact the development of executive functioning? What’s the quality of content retention when e-readers are compared to paper books? Is the OLED display bad for our children’s eyes? How can gamification improve test scores?

Sure, these questions are important. But what about the content? Let’s get back to the work traditionally done by philosophers, psychoanalysts, and literature scholars. Let’s think about the metaphorical and representational impact of our symbolic meaning systems. This false dichotomy--that places the nostalgia of one technology in opposition to a science fiction fear of a brave new world--only serves to distract us from the real issues. We need to remember why our ancestors started making tech in the fist place: stone tools to enable a better life, clay pots to distribute food to the tribe, cave drawings to transmit the history of civilization.

The future will be gamified. Probably not in the simple ways that we think about gamification today. It will run much deeper than just award badges and leveling up with each achievement. It will be interactive storytelling in which we’re deeply immersed through mobile devices.

These are still the formative years of the digital future. Our mobile and console games are like clumsy stories offerred around a campfire. In time, those stories will solidify into scripture for the next millenia. What do we want these stories to say? Luckily, Amanda Steinberg asks, "Why don't more storybooks feature self-funded princesses?" She's making suggestions.

In the interest of full disclosure, I should probably mention that Amanda Steinberg is my girlfriend.